As a result of a rather good model and constant adjustments using feedback.
It is feedback that makes it work even if the model is not perfect.
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Theories of Time
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As a result of a rather good model and constant adjustments using feedback.
It is feedback that makes it work even if the model is not perfect.
Mageth
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I'm certainly not claiming the model is perfect. In fact, referring to vision, much of what is in your field of vision is generated by the brain via some pretty nifty tricks, both spatially and temporally, to fill in gaps and save bandwidth/effort/time. Perfect vision across the entire field would be far too expensive and slow.
But again, IMO it's still generally an accurate representation of reality. Otherwise I'd bump into all sorts of things every morning.
DBT
Contributor
Feedback and updating perception is necessary because of an environment of changing conditions. Consequently, perception must represent conditions as they are changing in order to be able to negotiate and respond appropriately. Entropy probably being the source of change and therefore the perception of time relative to an observer.
That is because you define "accurate" as "making me not bump into things". So it rather circular...
Mageth
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No, accurate in that what I perceive as being in a certain place and going a particular speed and at a certain distance is actually in a certain place and going a particular speed and at a certain distance. Hence I can avoid bumping into it. Or ram it if I so choose. Not bumping into things is just an example use case for an accurate representation of reality.
In any case, I gave at least one other example as to why I accept the accuracy of my mental model with regard to reality on this thread. Our instruments, e.g. Cameras, can capture representations of reality which substantially match my mental image of reality.
4321lynx
Veteran Member
What information are you trying to get and from what images?
Mageth gets around, I used to play sports, all with binocular vision. When I lost that I immediately knew the difference, though my eyesight was and is otherwise completely unimpaired in both eyes. Owls hunt mice hidden by a foot or more of snow using their 3D sense of hearing, and so do arctic foxes and other kinds of foxes. Symbols or not, these things work. What are you talking about?
Speakpigeon
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I don't understand this idea of getting information directly in the context of this thread. I also don't have any example of information that we would get directly from the object perceived. All information is mediated by perception organs in my body.The question of the reliability of perception leads us to solipsism, the notion that everything outside of one's consciousness is pure hallucination. But even short of that, what info do we get from our senses.
First, we have more than the traditional five senses (Sense), with estimates like 15 to 20 senses. Here is a list:
- Mechanical
- Hearing
- Touch / Pressure
- Itch
- Acceleration / Gravity
- Rotation
- Proprioception -- joint orientation
- Temperature
- Heat
- Cold
- Pain
- Chemical
- Smell
- Taste
- Internal states, giving feelings of hunger, thirst, asphyxiation, ...
- Vision
- Time -- more detail in
Some organisms have additional senses, like these electromagnetic ones (quasi-static, macroscopic):
- Electric fields
- Magnetic fields
Let's see what spatial info that we get.
- Skin senses: 2D surface
- Vision: 2D directions
- Proprioception: angle values
- Acceleration: position change
- Rotation: orientation change
So we don't get full 3D-spatial information directly.
My brain could experience a 3000 °C temperature directly, yes, but it's not equipped to deal with that. I guess most of what would be direct experience is either ignored (normal gravitation for example) or damaging (commotion). Everything the brain does would have to be a code and there is no necessity for the code itself, as we are subjectively aware of it, to be "realistic". As already mentioned, we don't have a way to compare our experience of reality with reality itself. The most convincing approach for doing that is precisely science and science certainly deluded us about our naive notions that reality was really like our perception of it. As also said, that we survive in our environment does not show that our perception of reality is necessarily realistic.
There are a few things that are necessarily as we experience them and that's our impressions. If I have the impression that there is a ghost, even though there is no ghost, my impression of a ghost can only be real and exactly as I experience it.
Our perception of space is a complex reconstruction. For example, touch, which you didn't include in your list of what gives us information about 3D space, does in fact provide an important contribution to our perception of space.
More to the point, it seems quite obvious that we have to have a percept of 3D-space, reconstructed from the things you have listed. In that respect, it's exactly like every other percept we have that we take to be the real thing. We don't directly perceive the property of a surface to affect the wavelength of incident light. Instead, our brain uses the light coming off objects to produce somehow a colour code that we all take to be the actual property of the objects, which it is not. So what you suggested about time and space can be applied to just about the whole of our perception of reality, except our subjective impressions themselves.
Obviously, it's also rather a good thing that we tend to refuse to disbelieve our senses, even once we get to suspect that our percepts are only that, codes that are not even necessarily realistic.
Some people even refuse to accept this rather self-evident truth!
EB
That everything we experience is a construction, a symbol created to be useful rather than truthful. Your 3d experience is the result of heavy information processing in your brain. Not some "direct info" from what enters your eyes. You dont experience an image, you experience an interpreted image: trees, cars, people etc. It is hard to see the real image which is shown by that too learn to draw realisticly wee need to learn to see realisticly. And even then we only draw stuff as they appear to be.
Speakpigeon
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I would go with the B theory, but with the understanding that our concept of objective time, which is really that of Newton, couldn't possibly be true. For example, the notion that time goes in one direction seems an effect of our being such clumsy macroscopic things. Similarly, the idea that time could be described by a one-dimensional axis appears to be simplistic. Instead, I would go for something more sexy like multibranching, like in the multiverse theory, every possible change being in this case actual, something that also chimes with our sense of free will and also apparently with quantum physics.
Still, I can't really reconcile any theory of time with this impression of moving through time and of having a present subjective experience rather than one that would spread out over the whole of reality. But I guess I'm not the only one.
EB
4321lynx
Veteran Member
Every form of life has its own "reality", mine is totally different, perhaps, from the "reality" of a Monarch butterfly with its generational space travel from Mexico to Ontario and back again to Mexico for the winter. Neither is wrong and neither shows what really goes on.
What goes on is electrons and quarks, or maybe not, maybe it's vibrating strings, and waves, and wrinkles in space-time, and AdS/CFT -(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence) - and dark matter and dark energy and gravity and stuff. In the meantime our CNS and its "mind" is interpreting our macroworld and we seem to be surviving as a form of life on planet Earth, perceiving with our CNS/mind what we evolved to perceive and to interpret correctly in order to survive.
And the same goes for every form of life, even those whose "CNS/mind" consists of a few receptors for a single protein that tells them to multiply.
And when or if all life disappears from the universe, the universe will continue to exist, but "reality" will disappear because there will be no mind to observe it. Reality is mind dependent and mind is CNS dependent being a function of the CNS.
Reality is NOT existence. I repeat : no life, no reality. Existence is something else, and science tells me that existence requires time. And we exist, therefore time is.
That's what science tells me.
ontological_realist
Member
4321lynx
Veteran Member
Would be easier if you gave a link o_r. Will search soon.
ontological_realist
Member
Thanks for your suggestion. Here it is:-
http://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?2654-Noumenon-and-Phenomenon&p=75424#post75424
lpetrich
Contributor
I must concede that I have a bit more to add to my OP. I'll go through all the permutations of reality (1) or unreality (0) of the past, present, and future, in that order:
Philosopher JME McTaggart is the one who invented the terms "A-series" and "B-series". For his part, he argued that time is unreal.
I could not find anything on 001, 100, 101, or 011. The first three have real non-present times without a real present, which seems rather absurd, and the fourth is the shrinking block Universe, a time-reversed version of the growing one.
- 000: Unreality of time
- 001
- 010: Presentism, A-series
- 011
- 100
- 101
- 110: Growing block Universe
- 111: Eternalism, block universe, B-series
Philosopher JME McTaggart is the one who invented the terms "A-series" and "B-series". For his part, he argued that time is unreal.
I could not find anything on 001, 100, 101, or 011. The first three have real non-present times without a real present, which seems rather absurd, and the fourth is the shrinking block Universe, a time-reversed version of the growing one.
Two Faced Time
>>>>>>>>>>>arrow-of-time is linear>>>>>>>>>
<<<< past <<< Out < (*|*) < In <<< future <<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>arrow-of-time is linear>>>>>>>>>
Time is omni-directional frequency---thank you Bucky Fuller.
Time exists between positive gravity and negative gravity/reality.
We only observe the negative gravity/reality.
| = 2D slice-of-time aka temporal time.
r6
>>>>>>>>>>>arrow-of-time is linear>>>>>>>>>
<<<< past <<< Out < (*|*) < In <<< future <<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>arrow-of-time is linear>>>>>>>>>
Time is omni-directional frequency---thank you Bucky Fuller.
Time exists between positive gravity and negative gravity/reality.
We only observe the negative gravity/reality.
| = 2D slice-of-time aka temporal time.
r6
fast
Contributor
Nice!
Underseer
Contributor
I know that I often defend philosophy from those who belittle it, but in this case, the philosophers are no longer relevant. It is now in the realm of physics where evidence determines what is or is not true about time.
In fact the whole reason so many people are talking about the different "theories" of time from philosophy is because William Lane Craig tried to disprove special relativity with a syllogism. Welcome to the world of stretchy-gooshy timey-wimey physics where even simultaneity isn't what we once thought.
In fact the whole reason so many people are talking about the different "theories" of time from philosophy is because William Lane Craig tried to disprove special relativity with a syllogism. Welcome to the world of stretchy-gooshy timey-wimey physics where even simultaneity isn't what we once thought.
2D Triangual slice-of-time
I removed the "omni-directional" time since I dont recall his stating it that way.
So the center line is temporal time i.e. it is relative to our being conscious of time periods beginning ending and flowing through us and all around us, in all directions and a multitude of not myriad of frequencies.
We conscious anticipate an incoming future experience based on past experiences.
Time is our physical/reality
A 2D{ | } slice-of-3D-time is our present.
If were are riding on one of the four vertexes of a tetra{4}hedron, and that vertex is on a trajectgory through one of its opposite triangular opening, we arrive a point/position where we are the 2D plane of that triangle.
We have three lines-of-relationship to the three corners of the triangle that are also vertexia, as there is total three lines of relationship to each corner of the triangle.
r6
I removed the "omni-directional" time since I dont recall his stating it that way.
So the center line is temporal time i.e. it is relative to our being conscious of time periods beginning ending and flowing through us and all around us, in all directions and a multitude of not myriad of frequencies.
We conscious anticipate an incoming future experience based on past experiences.
Time is our physical/reality
A 2D{ | } slice-of-3D-time is our present.
If were are riding on one of the four vertexes of a tetra{4}hedron, and that vertex is on a trajectgory through one of its opposite triangular opening, we arrive a point/position where we are the 2D plane of that triangle.
We have three lines-of-relationship to the three corners of the triangle that are also vertexia, as there is total three lines of relationship to each corner of the triangle.
r6
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Outer, convex, positive shaped gravity surface is contractive occupied space
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Inside, outer-time-sine-wave connection to outer gravity may expand and contract
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..non-occupied space within, or between{ as I intended}, the given above and below, occupied space..
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Inside, inner-time-sine-wave connection to inner gravity/reality may expand and contract.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Inner, concave, negative shaped gravity/reality surface is expansive occupied space
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Outer, convex, positive shaped gravity surface is contractive occupied space
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Inside, outer-time-sine-wave connection to outer gravity may expand and contract
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
..non-occupied space within, or between{ as I intended}, the given above and below, occupied space..
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Inside, inner-time-sine-wave connection to inner gravity/reality may expand and contract.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Inner, concave, negative shaped gravity/reality surface is expansive occupied space
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't fully understand your questions except as to say you think that time is multi-dimensional and you wonder if time truly exists, at least in the way humans understand it. That would be very difficult to answer without further knowledge.
Scientists measure time on atomic scales relative to the speed of electrons and pulses they emit. We know that time exists as an element of reality through the patterns of nature (seasons, planets, life and death). Time is difficult to examine because it is such a basic concept, much like when ancient scientists turned their attention on their own breathing and added an extra dimension to their self-awareness.
Humans don't have a definitive lock on the characteristics of time and all of what time is. We know that time is linear in our dimension, but maybe, time isn't linear in other dimensions, and if so, in a dimension of non-linear time, how could one exist? It get too abstract to comprehend. But we do know, through the examination of great measurements of space, that time is subjective to speed and gravity and possibly other factors of existence.
Scientists measure time on atomic scales relative to the speed of electrons and pulses they emit. We know that time exists as an element of reality through the patterns of nature (seasons, planets, life and death). Time is difficult to examine because it is such a basic concept, much like when ancient scientists turned their attention on their own breathing and added an extra dimension to their self-awareness.
Humans don't have a definitive lock on the characteristics of time and all of what time is. We know that time is linear in our dimension, but maybe, time isn't linear in other dimensions, and if so, in a dimension of non-linear time, how could one exist? It get too abstract to comprehend. But we do know, through the examination of great measurements of space, that time is subjective to speed and gravity and possibly other factors of existence.